Why I posted on LinkedIn for 1,000 days straight
These three things are the byproduct of your business.
About 18 months into posting on LinkedIn every day, I got on a call with another founder who had roughly the same follower count as me.
At some point he told me, "Honestly, daily posting is just for likes. You're just chasing the algorithm."
I laughed it off on the call. But it sat with me for the rest of the day. Because part of me wondered if he was right. I had been showing up every single day for a 1/2 a year. Both weekends and holidays. Days I felt like garbage. Days my fiancée and I were traveling. Days I had nothing to say and forced myself to publish really anything.
I almost stopped daily posting.
The case he made was the same one I had been quietly making to myself on hard days. The likes are not the business. The followers are not the business. The clients are the business. So why keep grinding out organic content?
But this is what I hadn’t understood yet:
LinkedIn content isn’t the entire point.
I came up on Twitch. I have been streaming since 2014, which means I spent close to a decade going live whether I felt like it or not. Some nights it was ten people. Some nights it was a thousand. The number was never in my control. What was in my control was turning the camera on.
When you turn the camera on that many times, something happens that nobody talks about. You’re not really performing anymore; you’re not rehearsing; you’re not precious; it’s almost like you just begin talking, naturally, no script.
LinkedIn is the same thing. Your content is the camera. And most founders never post enough to get past the performance stage. They write three drafts, painfully overthink the hook, and nothing works for them.
The reps buy you these 3 things:
The first is speed. Around day 400, I could sit down and write a post in nine minutes. Because I had already written four hundred of them. My vocabulary and structure were loaded into my brain.
The second is pattern recognition. When you post daily and read the comments daily and DM with the people who engage daily, you start to see the same problems over and over. By month twelve, I could tell you within thirty seconds of reading a founder's profile why they were not getting inbound. I had seen the exact pattern nine hundred times. You cannot shortcut that with a course.
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The third one is the biggest. You stop being afraid to publish something imperfect. Every founder I coach has the same disease. They want the post to be finished before they publish it. They want a guarantee it will land. There is no guarantee. There is only the publish button. When you press the button 1,000 times, you learn that the post you agonized over for two hours often does 400 views, and the post you dashed off in an airport lounge closes a $30K client.
The market cares about whether the thing resonated with a specific person on a specific day. Once you internalize that, you stop trying to write perfect posts.
The founder who told me daily posting was a vanity metric quit LinkedIn about four months after that call. He is back at a job now. Which is fine.
I have watched this play out with dozens of founders. They post for 60 days. Then 90. Nothing really works for them at all. Then they hit some invisible wall around day 100 and quit. The reason they quit is that they were counting the wrong thing.
If you count followers, you will quit. Followers move slowly and the numbers will lie to you. If you count reps, you cannot quit. Because every day you show up is a rep, and reps are entirely inside your control.
I am past 1,000 days now. If you asked me what I actually got out of it, the follower count would be at the bottom of the list. The top of the list is that I can sit down on a Tuesday morning, look at a founder's business, and know within an hour what is broken and how to fix it.
These skills are the byproduct of showing up when it was inconvenient.
So if you are around day 45, or day 90, or day 200, and you’re wondering if this is worth it, I will not tell you it is. That is your call. But I will tell you what you’re actually buying with the reps.
You are buying speed. You are buying pattern recognition. You are buying the ability to publish without needing permission.
Those three things are the whole business.
Turn the camera on NOW.
And if you want help building the reps inside a system that actually works, I'm opening the next cohort of the LinkedIn Growth System. It's the exact framework I've used to coach 270+ founders through the five pillars: content, DMs, Lives, newsletters, and profile.
Only 20 spots. Waitlist is open here: alexcolhoun.com/cohort
See you on LinkedIn,
